A History of the Universe in 100 Stars cover art

A History of the Universe in 100 Stars

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

A History of the Universe in 100 Stars

By: Florian Freistetter, Gesche Ipsen
Narrated by: Richard Burnip
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £16.51

Buy Now for £16.51

Summary

From the Big Bang to the Gaia Mission, this is a very personal history of the universe through the author's favourite 100 stars.

Astronomer Florian Freistetter has chosen 100 stars that have almost nothing in common. Some are bright and famous, some shine so feebly you need a huge telescope. There are big stars, small stars, nearby stars and faraway stars. Some died a while ago, others have not even yet come into being. Collectively they tell the story of the whole world, according to Freistetter. There is Algol, for example, the Demon Star, whose strange behaviour has long caused people sleepless nights. And Gamma Draconis, from which we know that the earth rotates around its own axis. There is also the star sequence 61 Cygni, which revealed the size of the cosmos to us.

Then there are certain stars used by astronomers to search for extra-terrestrial life, to explore interstellar space travel, or to explain why the dinosaurs became extinct.

In 100 short, fascinating and entertaining chapters, Freistetter not only reveals the past and future of the cosmos, but also the story of the people who have tried to understand the world in which we live.

©2019 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München (P)2021 Quercus Editions Limited Astronomy Astronomy & Space Science Cosmology Physics Science Interstellar Black Hole Ancient Greece
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
All stars
Most relevant
The best audiobook on astronomy.
Over 100 short chapters he covers all the history and current developments in astronomy.
I loved this audiobook!

Utterly superb

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I loved this book. 100 short stories makes for a fast-paced barrage of wonderful facts and explanations. As soon as I finished I began again as there was so much to absorb. And I am glad I did as it was just as enjoyable the second time.

Cosmic Tour de Force

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is simply brilliant! Captivating stories with just enough detail (I will admit I have purchased other books to delve deeper into some of the stories). Incredibly well researched and the performance of the narrator was spot on. Big shout out for an excellent translation into English. I only wish my rusty German was still good enough to have understood it in the original German.

Enthralling!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An enjoyable trek in the era of Webb and Hubble - to be dipped into in any order.

Boldly gone …,,,,,,

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a great listen. As the title says, it’s divided into a hundred self-contained chapters and each chapter is properly labelled so you can find things again later: ALL audiobook producers should do the same. The translation from the original German is seamless and the reader is absolutely excellent. I could listen to him all day and he’d obviously done his homework because there are none of the pronunciation howlers that mar so many technical books. There’s a fair bit of physics detail but each new definition is described in detail as it comes up, and thereafter the listener is treated as a grown-up and is assumed to have understood what has already been explained. Recommended without reservation.

The best audiobook on astronomy that I own

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews